1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of email tracking and, more particularly, to embedding a unique serial number into the content of an email for tracking information dispersion.
2. Description of the Related Art
In business today, email is commonly used to communicate with a business' employees. Often these emails contain sensitive information that is not intended for public consumption. Many problems could arise for a business if such sensitive information was leaked. For example, an email could contain information regarding a new line of products in development by the company. If this information was leaked to a competitor for example, this could give the competitor the chance to come up with a better product before the product is even released.
Currently, protection exists to keep a user from copying sensitive information, but these protections can easily be circumvented. For example, a user can take screenshots of the information, or copy them to a USB drive to prevent firewall based tracking. The user can then disperse the sensitive information to whoever they want. There are currently solutions for tracking down such information leaks. For example, one such solution is called a “canary trap” where the contents can be modified in each email and sent to a unique user, associating a revision of the content with the recipient user. When a leak occurs, the leaked text can be referenced to the user to find the source of the leak. The problem with implementing such a system is that a user has to manually do these modifications and track the changes with their associated users. This kind of implementation becomes very troublesome with a large number of recipient users. A more intuitive solution is required to track information dispersion in emails.